Stephen Vitiello is a sound artist looking to open his audience to the world of vibrations. His career has spanned from electronic music to scoring experimental videos to his most recent form of work — larger-scale public installations that make immersive soudscapes accessible to a wider audience.

He started his PopTech presentation off with a story of an encounter in Sydney, Australia, where he had installed “The Sound Of Red Earth” at the Sydney brickworks. Vitiello recalled how a young girl had pulled him aside to shyly ask him a question — “do you ever just lean down and put your ear to the table to listen to the sounds?” It seems that this sense of child-like wonder and curiosity is what he hopes to evoke with his work.

Vitiello also told of his experience as a resident artist in the World Trade Center in 1999. He spent six months working out of a studio on the 91st floor of Tower One, and used contact microphones to record the building’s internal sounds at all times of day. An excerpt from one recording during a severe storm revealed the internal creakings of the massive building under stress.

Stephen’s most recent public sound installation, called “A Bell for Every Minute,” is placed in Manhattan’s High Line Park. Vitiello sampled bell sounds from throughout New York City’s five boroughs, including the New York Stock Exchange, the United Nations Peace Bell, and the recently excavated Coney Island Dreamland bell. He finished his talk with a recording of the sound that plays at the High Line installation every hour — all of the 59 bells layered into one room-filling sound.

Consider this: The ratio of mobile phone subscribers in the developing world to the developed world is 4:1. It’s a democratized platform since there’s no single demographic that owns a mobile phone. As Nathan Eagle, visiting assistant professor at MIT and research assistant professor at Northeastern University, explains, manual laborers in Africa, like the guys who dig ditches, are organizing and finding work through SMS. You need a phone to be part of the system.

But with 3 billion mobile phone users and 1.5 billion unemployed people, is there a way to harness mobile technology to provide work for the un- or under-employed? Is there a way to crowdsource tasks, monetize idle time, and easily compensate workers at the same time?

Kicking off in Africa, Nathan Eagle created txteagle to enable people in developing countries to earn money or airtime by performing tasks via their mobile phone. Some of the work is outsourced, like video tagging, invoice processing, or audio transcribing, but Eagle hopes that the majority of the jobs will become those that depend on more knowledge, allowing people to be close to home.

Thus far, txteagle has been integrated into the billing systems of 220 mobile phone operators in Africa, reaching 2.1 billion phones. This means txteagle can compensate all of these 2.1 billion people, empowering the largest workforce on earth. Next up: txteagle is looking for more crowdsourced, locally-focused, projects to give this massive community the opportunity to improve its economic status.

Eli Pariser spent the last decade organizing people. Now, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, is organizing information.

Algorithms generally manage the enormous amounts of available data by giving you more of what you like with every click. The trouble, says Pariser, is that the vision of perfect machine categorization often fails to adequately represent the multiple ways that information can be grouped.

To underscore his point, Pariser tells the story about physicist Niels Bohr, who once proposed calculating the height of a building by using a barometer as a weight. Bohr’s failure to use the barometer as a measurement device meant he failed his high school physics exam but it also reveals a flexibility of thought that machine curation does not adequately capture.

For example, Netflix bases its categorization system on prediction, namely “if you like this, you’ll like that.” Once the Netflix model determines a user like romantic comedies, says Pariser, it will continue to suggest romantic comedies, effectively narrowing the types recommended. In other words, the Netflix algorithm doesn’t provide users with risky choices.

Pariser says that machine curation also risks reducing the “noise,” namely the randomness and unpredictably, of information to a point that it impedes the creative process. Here, Pariser points to Dean Simonton’s research on spontaneous creativity and the likelihood that similar creative ideas will pop up in a lot of different places the same time. “A perfectly relevant environment,” laments Pariser, “lacks the ability to recognize this kind of variation.”

Pariser suggests that this narrowing of information doesn’t need to be inevitable. “We need media systems to make us uncomfortable. We need media to help us pay attention to the things that we don’t know. We need systems that don’t block us.”

In the meantime, he’s starting to work on a site he’s going to call thingsyoullhate.com. It’s not up yet, but when it is, Pariser wants it to highlight ideas and things that people completely unlike you think are great.

Riley Crane found out about the DARPA network challenge (find ten balloons placed in ten different locations around the country) four days before it started. Four days, eight hours, and 52 minutes later his team, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, had won it.

How they did it is a testament to the power of crowdsourcing solutions and the ability of social networking to tackle seemingly impossible tasks. Crane’s approach was to set up a system in which every person who volunteered to help was given a unique URL that could be shared with that person’s social networks (primarily via Twitter and Facebook). The process was repeated over and over again. Everyone who signed on was guaranteed a part of the $40,000 prize purse if the team won.

This family tree approach gave Crane’s team access to the collective power of an extraordinary number of individual networks. Slashdot posted an open letter from the MIT team (best comment: "re: balloons – will there be a little boy trapped inside each one?”), which massively increased interest, and Crane’s team was able to access even more networks.

The impact of chemicals on cell structure, however, is no laughing matter. With over 85,000 chemicals produced in the last century, the average person now has between 300-500 of miscellaneous chemicals in their systems. It’s the “bouncers”, officially known as multi-drug transporters, that work to keep the bad guys out. The question is, why do some of the “bad” chemicals make it into the cells and how can we predict which ones will do so (with averse and often unknown consequences) as we develop even more chemicals?

Hamdoun, a cell biologist, focuses his research specifically on embryos using sea urchins for test subjects: one sea urchin can produce roughly a million eggs in ten minutes, which is comparable to the reproduction efforts of 5,000 mice. The goal of his research? To ensure cells can keep out the bad chemicals and thereby prevent birth defects and other anomalies of embryonic growth.

To learn more about his work, Hamdoun invites the PopTech community to check out hamdounlab.org.

Social Innovation Fellow Salinee Tavaranan and the Border Green Energy Team are helping to bring light to some of the world’s darkest places. She and her team work on the border of her homeland, Thailand, and Burma, a country that’s been embroiled in civil war for over sixty years, to bring solar power to clinics and medical facilities that desperately need it.

The team is up against enormous challenges: in addition to the ongoing war, they struggle with lack of road access, transporting heavy equipment that needs to be hand-carried up and down mountains, and the general sense of uncertainty and danger inherent in working in the borderlands.

An emotional Tavaranan recounted perhaps the team’s biggest challenge: the loss of co-founder and “solar hero” Walt Ratterman to the Haitian earthquake, where he was finishing up a training session on solar technology.

Tavaran and her team are committed to continuing Ratterman’s good work: providing solar power to the places, like schools and hospitals, that need it most. She ended by asking the PopTech community to let her know if they could help.

Own Your Future is a collaborative project of the PopTech Accelerator and the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School (BCAM), a small public high school in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, run by founding principal and 2009 Social Innovation Fellow, James O’Brien. Through this program, students, including two youth ambassadors who attended this year’s conference, will receive year-long training in art, design, technology, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy to develop marketable products and skills.

This knowledge enables students to develop, market, and sell creative products and services. The money earned is then deposited into the students’ savings accounts and made available to them upon graduation — to help pay the way to college. Preparing BCAM students to become active members of the creative economy equips then with tools for the future and will hopefully become a replicable model.

They realized that the rough terrain and rundown streets around their home in the West Bank Al-Askar refugee camp made life difficult for a blind friend. So, they developed an electronic cane equipped with ground sensors which cause it to beep or vibrate when confronted by a hole or obstacle. Earlier this year, the four won a special award in applied enginering at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair — a first for any Palestinian representative.

Deborah Kenny, founder and chief executive of Harlem Village Academies, noticed Eugene when he showed up for the first day of school. Head down, making no eye contact, he walked past the teachers greeting the students and seemed to grumble to himself. Later that day, while the teachers were administering a test to determine students’ reading levels, Kenny saw that Eugene hadn’t even picked up his pencil. In fact, it seemed that he was tearing up. Only later did she find out that his response was due to his inability to read. At all. But without fail, every year he was moved up to the next grade.

Kenny invited Eugene’s mother to meet with her. His mother knew he’d be severely handicapped without learning how to read. And Eugene knew he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was in jail. Seven years later, as a result of his education at the Harlem Village Academy, he’s reading the Iliad, has taken the chemistry regents exam and is on his way to college. “We know what works,” Kenny said. “But do we have the political will to scale up?”

Kenny attributed the Harlem Village Academy’s success to bringing out passion in teachers: establishing a culture that gives them ownership over everything they do, creating a sense of team spirit, and developing a space where teachers learn from one another. Based on that approach, the school produces students who are wholesome in character, avid readers, sophisticated intellectually, independent thinkers, and most importantly, compassionate.

John Legend’s activism is deeply intertwined with his music. As he mentioned in his talk that led this morning’s PopTech session on Teaching & Learning, this juxtaposition has not been as common since singer/song-writers of the sixties. But it’s time, says Legend, to put the politics back into music — specifically in order to address a public education system that he describes as “completely broken”.

Legend had been working on his latest musical project called “Wake Up” with co-creators, the Roots. They wanted to include a video portion in the piece that explored the neighbors and people living and being educated in impoverished communities. As they started to research the project, they realized, serendipitously, that filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (who directed “An Inconvenient Truth”) was just putting the finishing touches on a documentary that covered the same topic: the film became Waiting for Superman

He closed his session by playing piano and singing two songs: the aforementioned “Wake Up”and a song from the film “Waiting for Superman” entitled “Let ’Em Shine.” This in an enormously important film, says Legend, who urged everyone in the room to see it. “Kids need to break the cycle of poverty,” says Legend, adding that right now we’re not giving low-income and minority kids a chance to succeed. “We, the adults, owe them that chance.”